Good news stories about the environment can seem hard to find these days, which makes it nice to report that power plants across the country have collectively decreased emissions of…
Discoveries
Torching the Invaders
The more researchers learn about barberry, the more they find to dislike about it. The thorny perennial shrub escaped from cultivated landscapes after being introduced to the U.S. in the…
Whole-tree Harvesting Might Not Deplete Calcium
A renewed interest has emerged in recent years in whole-tree harvesting, a practice that has been scorned by many as dangerous to the health of the forest ecosystem because it depletes the…
Bright Berries Beloved by Birds
Health-conscious humans have long known that brightly colored vegetables are healthier than blandly colored ones; turns out, songbirds also pay attention to color when it comes to their food.…
Caterpillars: Some Like it Hot
Dartmouth College Professor Richard Holmes has been counting caterpillars at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest for more than 20 years. He was mostly interested in understanding the…
Poplar Genetics
After helping to decipher the genome of the poplar tree in 2006 and finding it had 45,000 different genes, University of Toronto Professor Malcolm Campbell turned to the next logical question:…
Wind Turbines and Migrating Bats
The push for new wind power facilities across the country is driving research to understand the various ecological impacts wind turbines may have. One such study may play a role in the siting…
Clearings For Courtship
Two wildlife biologists in Rhode Island studying how forest-dwelling game birds make use of their habitat found that the birds unexpectedly exhibited what one described as “the bar scene…
Red Maple Jumps To An Early Lead
Red maple trees are becoming increasingly dominant in forests throughout the eastern United States, and that worries Kim Steiner. A professor of forest biology at Penn State University,…
Hope on the Eastern Front
Eastern hemlock forests are under siege by the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid, but a University of Massachusetts researcher thinks there is reason to be optimistic that the invasion may be…
Predicting Fishless Lakes
The woods of Maine host the greatest abundance of fishless lakes in the Northeast, but their abundance is declining due to state-sanctioned fish stocking for recreational anglers and illegal…
Where the Cellulose Meets the Road
Wooden tires went out of style a century ago, along with buggy whips and horse-drawn wagons, but if an Oregon State University researcher has anything to say about it, a modern relative of the…
Digging for Worms
When Colgate University biologist Tim McCay began studying the impact of acid rain on soils and forest-dwelling animals in the Adirondacks, he started by heading into the forest and counting…
The Power of Trees
When scientists and students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hammered a nail into a tree on campus and wired it to a metal rod in the ground, they confirmed Internet reports…
Some Like it Moist
Like Hagenbuch, Laurie Richmond was interested in learning more about the impact that forestry practices have on wildlife. Earlier research had shown that forest harvesting can cause…
Birds in the Bush
A considerable amount of research has been conducted about the impact of timber management on bird habitat, but few if any scientific studies have examined how management for non-timber forest…
Tempest in a Teapot
Manipulating ecosystems to affect biodiversity and examine species interactions can be an overwhelming challenge, especially when trying to understand complete food webs. Unless, that is, the…
Fighting Fire Without Fire
In areas where even a light controlled burn can be dangerous to surrounding communities, forestry officials at the Montague Plains Wildlife Management Area in west-central Massachusetts is one…
Greater Fires Mean Greater Diversity
When it comes to fires, forest management practices across the U.S. have evolved considerably in recent decades, from complete fire suppression in all forests to the realization that fire…
Invasive Pest Knocked Out
The United States has been under assault for decades by a wide variety of alien plants and animals, and it is not often that one of these aliens faces a counterpunch. But in a collaborative…